Public speaking is the number one fear in America. This fear, known as glossophobia, affects 25% of the population. With these statistics, it’s no wonder why so many of us are plagued with doubt when we open up a notebook or blank document.

Whether writing blog posts, newsletters, or a book, your writing allows you to speak to the public on behalf of your company, employer, and yourself.

“Yeah, I know! That’s why I’m freaking out!”

Sometimes this responsibility can feel like the world is placed on your shoulders. You’re creating something that others will read and critique. Your words will be imprinted on the screens and in the minds of other people.

A lot of people don’t want to write because they don’t want their words (aka their thoughts and ideas) to be rejected. Or argued. Or mocked.

That fear of criticism can be a big deal if writing isn’t your cup of tea. It can be a big deal even if writing is your cup of tea.

Ultimately, this fear leads to self-doubt. And self-doubt is the root of writer’s block.

10 to 20 seconds. That’s the average amount of time a person will spend on your website, according to Nielsen Norman Group. That’s not a lot of time to capture their attention. If you have something to sell them, you have to wow them in that 10-20 seconds. Otherwise, you just lost a potential customer.

Pictures are great. But they are not enough. First of all, not everyone can see that wonderful picture. There will be people who are browsing your website who are visually impaired. That is why you need product descriptions.

There are good product descriptions and bad ones. Good product descriptions will grab visitors’ attention. Bad product descriptions will make them go somewhere else.

Below are 4 deadly product description mistakes that can cause you to lose sales.

If you’ve ever felt like your keyword problems are completely unique and nothing on the Internet can help you, then you’re not alone. Every business has its strange and unprecedented challenges that make inbound marketers pull their hair out and lose sleep at night.

It’s okay – we are all losing our hair.

We could write a book on all of the peculiar instances and keyword conundrums that our clients have complained about, which has made us pros in coming up with solutions.

Here are a few keyword problems that we see on a regular basis and a few ideas to tackle them. By no means is this a complete list, but hopefully it gets your creative juices flowing.

Spokal integrates very closely with WordPress, so we get a lot of questions about all things WordPress related. But the most pressing of them all is the WordPress.com vs WordPress.org debate.

If you’re completely new to WordPress, you’re probably in the midst of this conundrum. If you’re WordPress savvy, you might be asking yourself should you switch to one or the other. Or, you might just be curious what the differences between the two actually are!

Well, no worries – You’ve come to the right place!

I’ve done the hard work for you and collected all the information I can get my greedy little fingers on so that you can make an informed decision.

In this post, I’ll have a look at both sides of the WordPress.com vs WordPress.org debate, and discuss each of their pros and cons.

A Brief History

For a surprisingly long time, it used to be that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was all about stuffing your content full of keywords and getting as many backlinks as you could from anywhere you could get them. This led to a lot of people gaming the system, and in many cases, low-quality search results.

It also meant that you could, just by spending money, hire someone to throw a bunch of keywords onto your pages, and then spam links to your website out into the wild, wild web, and see a measurable increase in search engine visits, and leads to your business. These kinds of tactics were usually called ‘blackhat’.

As search engines evolved, they devised ways to try to combat people gaming the system. Over time, blackhat tactics started becoming less effective, and now will even result in penalties – get caught link spamming now and Google may remove your site from its indexes entirely.

Now, in 2013….

The game has changed. Now, in 2013 and beyond, old tactics are becoming less relevant, and Social Media is playing an increasingly important role in how your blog content ranks in Search Engines.

Search Metrics do an annual correlation study of ranking factors for Google.com. This is perhaps the best study on search engine ranking factors that exists. It’s a correlative study, and correlation does not equal causation – so some caution is needed when you’re looking at the numbers below, however I believe there’s a number of important takeaways we can get from it.

What they found is that in 2013 – traditional SEO tactics (like keywords in the url, in the title, keyword density, and backlinks) are still relevant, but now are basically just required to play the game. Social media is starting to play a large part of the SEO algorithm.

Social signals continue to correlate very well with better rankings – SearchMetrics

This is wrong because it forces you to believe everything you create needs to be an opus, which prevents many of us from saying anything.

While I hate to say it, you just need to be a little better than the average business in your niche. If you’re focused on learning, it’s easy to rise to the top and provide real value to your customers.

Here are 9 rules to creating good content that will help you rise above the noise.

Sometimes as marketers we go over the top naming things, which can make them seem more complicated than they are.

Keywords are simply the words and phrases you type into Google when you’re looking for something. They can be anything.

So, why should you care about them?

If you understand what your customers are searching for, you can figure out what type of content to create (like blog posts, ebooks and videos) to capture their attention and answer their questions by providing value. You can read more about keywords here.

But we’re not perfect. Here are 5 common mistakes using keywords in your blog that you should avoid.

1. You break the “1 keyword/post rule”

While you’re trying to rank for multiple keywords, each post should focus on one.

Your goal is to optimize each post, so you have the highest chance of being found in Google for that keyword.

If you put too many keywords in a post (aka the same phrase of certain words over and over again), you won’t optimize for anything, your post will sound fake, and worst, your blog will get lost among the sea of 150,000,000 blogs that are online today.